A Super Bowl With a Side of Darkness

Guess it’s time to start comparing Joe Flacco to quarterbacks other than Rich Gannon.

While it stands as the unquestioned pinnacle and chronologically ultimate game of the NFL season, there’s inevitably something anticlimactic about Super Bowls. After all those weeks of hype and hyper conversation, buzz and counterbuzz and entertaining Legends of Randy Moss and analyses of Jim Harbaugh’s long-lost cameo on teen sitcom “Saved By The Bell,” there is, finally, just a football game. In many ways, this is a relief: the pomp and circumstance and synergy and overall overage seem more confusing by the year, while a football game is just a football game. Baltimore’s hard-fought Super Bowl victory on Sunday was, in one sense, just a football game—one the Ravens won 34-31, after a number of dramatic twists and one prolonged electrical failure. In another sense, though, it may have been the start of something altogether stranger. Here, finally, was a Super Bowl weird enough to match the high-volume, high-octane weirdness that came before, and which filled out the typically endless commercial breaks.

It was a good game, on the whole, but let’s start with the bit that everyone will remember—the moment, early in the second half, when half of the New Orleans Superdome abruptly went dark. “Vooomp! Blackout at the Super Bowl,” Jason Gay writes. “Isn’t that the plot of, like, 80% of all of the shiny-covered thrillers sold at the airport? It never ends well. It often ends with zombies. Hungry zombies, punching bony fists through windows. Inside the Superdome, there was an awkward, surreal silence.” It was less silent in living rooms and sports bars and on the Internet, where speculation arrived that Beyoncé’s not-quite-understated halftime show had triggered the overload (it didn’t), while CBS Sports struggled mightily and less-than-heroically to fill what wound up being 34 minutes of dim and football-free inaction with ad-libbed nattering from its studio team. (“We are all stupider for having witnessed it,” Sports On Earth’s Will Leitch writes. “I spent most of the rest of the third quarter sweeping up all my dead brain cells off the floor.”)

When the lights went out, the Ravens appeared to be on the verge of putting the game away. After dominating the first half, Baltimore’s Jacoby Jones began the second with a 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown, pushing Baltimore’s advantage to 28-6. But after 34 minutes in the semi-dark—Gay compared the Superdome lighting to that of a truck stop bathroom, which is probably the first time that image has ever been deployed in the service of a Super Bowl column—the 49ers surged back against a Ravens team that looked suddenly and severely flat and flubby. The Ravens woke up, but the 49ers had a chance to take command when they set up for a first-and-goal from the Baltimore 7-yard line with 2:39 left. Four plays later, the score was the same and the Ravens had all but locked up a win.

The Ravens had some rough weeks—a rough month, even—this season, and entered the postseason dinged-up and fairly roundly written-off. They ended it on Sunday as a study in resilience, both against an imposing opponent and the circumstances dictated by the Superdome’s over-amped electrical system. “The Ravens are the rare champion that can say nobody believed in them,” Sports Illustrated’s Michael Rosenberg writes. “A few weeks ago, nobody did. … It helps to believe. But destiny is for storytellers; football coaches deal in reality. This was a victory for and about one of the best organizations in the league.”

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Being the top-ranked team in the nation adds some pressure, but also ensures some swagger. Given that top-ranked Michigan was playing Indiana—formerly a top-ranked team in its own right and at that moment third in the nation—it’s questionable whether the Hoosiers’ impressive 81-73 home win on Saturday quite qualifies as an upset. Still, that loss—and losses by second-ranked Kansas and sixth-ranked Syracuse to unranked opponents—highlighted another typically topsy-turvy week in college hoops.

“It’ll likely be Indiana’s turn again at the top of the polls after what the Hoosiers did to the Wolverines on Saturday night, but what that means is defeat probably can’t be far behind,” USA Today’s Mike Lopresti writes. “The No. 1 teams have come and gone like trains lately; this was the fourth consecutive week they’ve fallen. Life as a target is not easy.”

And, of course, it won’t be easy for the Hoosiers, who look likely to be the new number one for however many weeks they can keep it. But besides being a fun, high-intensity game, Saturday’s win also served notice that Indiana—which was ranked first in the nation in preseason polls—seems ready to occupy that top spot. “The biggest game of the regular season—not just IU’s or the Big Ten’s regular season, but all of college basketball’s—came to Bloomington, and Indiana finally put forth a full effort befitting a No. 1,” Sports Illustrated’s Luke Winn writes. “This was the powerhouse that writers and fans envisioned in the offseason.” At the very least, the Hoosiers earned a return stay in college basketball’s most desirable revolving-door address.

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Phil Mickelson has had a very successful and very lucrative career on the PGA Tour, and has one of the most devoted fan followings of any golfer on the tour. But it’s difficult to see how dazzlingly well Lefty plays at the Phoenix Open and wonder whether the rest of that career could’ve been better. This is no knock on Mickelson’s accomplishments—it’s just that, for the second straight year, he displayed such unrelenting, wall-to-wall dominance at the Phoenix Open. Mickelson began the tournament with a dazzling and semi-heartbreaking 60 in his opening round—the heartbreaking part was a lipped-out putt that denied him a historic 59. He only barely let up after that, going wire-to-wire and making his way back into the tour’s top 10.

Because Mickelson has played so well in Phoenix, there’s a certain of-course factor to his win. But as the Arizona Republic’s Paola Boivin points out, Mickelson’s superb play over the weekend may also be part of a late-career surge. “A recent study by the Journal of Aging and Physical Activities reports that most golfers’ skills begin deteriorating at 37,” Boivin writes. “Mickelson has won nine times since he turned that age. The way he maneuvered this course—shooting 60, 65, 64 and 67—suggests he is winning the battle against Father Time.” Well, that or he just feels comfortable and plays well in Phoenix. Either way, it was Lefty at his best.

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